By Joseph Varghese/Staff Reporter


Georgetown University in Qatar (GU-Q) has started its 10th year anniversary celebrations with a two-day conference titled, “Scapes of Power: A Critical Appraisal” yesterday.
The university will hold a gala event today evening to mark the occasion.
Dr Gerd Nonneman, dean GU-Q said that the university has been a great facilitator of education and research in the country for the past 10 years.
He said: “It has been able to contribute to education and research in Qatar in a big way and the concept of school of foreign services has been well established, with our alumni serving various sectors in Qatar and outside. Our multicultural community of alumni, students and faculty have helped to create some of the most meaningful research and relevant knowledge about international affairs and  the Middle East, right here in Doha”
The GU- Q dean added: “We opened the Qatar campus of Georgetown a decade ago with two dozen students and a few faculty members. Today, Georgetown in Qatar is a research powerhouse, constantly adding to the global body of knowledge about matters local, regional and international, and helping to lay the foundations for a sustainable research ecosystem that will be a lasting legacy for both Georgetown and Qatar.”
The conference started with a presentation by Dr Laura Doyle, a professor at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, on  “Inter-imperial Powerscapes” in which she discussed and gave an  appraisal of historical and contemporary examples of power expressed through cultural, social, economic and political institutions.She explained the idea of three dimensional cultural and historical movements  which are lateral, among the empires, vectoral–amid the empires and temporal- across the empires.
Dr Sherman Jackson, a professor at the University of Southern California, will deliver a keynote address today on “Islam and Power: Between Shari’ah and the Islamic Secular.”
The conference includes  the panels: Empire; Then and Now, Within and Beyond the Nation-State, Empowering the Disempowered, Forging Knowledge and Culture, and Muslims in Global Perspective. A range of topics will present new ways of understanding how power has been used to control society from above, but also how it can be harnessed to enable change.